Introduction

The public policy agendas of revolutionary socialist and Islamist organisations in the UK have increasingly converged on the question of Israeli action in Gaza. This convergence has become especially pronounced following the termination of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on 19 December 2008.

In London, a national protest took place on 3 January 2009 under the heading ‘National Gaza Massacre Demonstration’. It included the slogans ‘Hands off Gaza. Stop the Bombings. Free Palestine’ called by the Palestine Solidarity Organisation; Stop the War Coalition (STWC); British Muslim Initiative; CND and many other organisations. The speakers included Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London.[1]

This article highlights the involvement of two key controlling revolutionary organisations involved in these London protests through their ‘front’[2] organisations or politicians (the list includes STWC; British Muslim Initiative and Ken Livingstone as a political personality through his advisers), through an examination of the key objectives and political methods of these modern revolutionary socialist and Islamist UK actors.  Specifically, attention will be given to analyzing how the organisations manipulate and infiltrate state agencies and mobilise public opinion. By doing so they influence public policy on the questions of terrorist non-state actors in the Middle East, such as Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement), which has been declared a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States of America, and their positions of opposition to legitimate nation-states like Israel.

Protests such as this one, which mobilise the Islamic and peace constituencies in the UK,  put the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary under pressure regarding their policy towards Gaza. The primary aim is to shift UK policy away from supporting Israel’s sovereign right to defend itself against Hamas attacks, whilst a secondary aim is to legitimise Hamas. Furthermore, these constituencies seek to rally the forces opposed to the two-state solution and build an anti-Zionist (i.e., not recognising the right of the state of Israel to exist) position amongst Islamic, peace and left wing groups in the UK. A distinction should be made between these acts and the legitimate democratic right of any member of the UK’s general public to protest, criticise and oppose state policy.

Socialist Action and Muslim Association of Britain: Examples of Extreme Entryist Organisations

Two key revolutionary socialist and revolutionary Islamicist ‘entryist’[3] organisations in the UK have adopted a strategy which uses the authority and resources of the UK to support Hamas and oppose Israel.  'Entryism' is a political tactic by which an organisation or state encourages its members or agents to infiltrate another organisation in an attempt to gain recruits or take it over entirely. These are Socialist Action (which is not an open, but a deep entryist organisation that seeks to hide its real identity in UK politics) and the Muslim Association of Britain (a front for the Muslim Brotherhood organisation in the UK, which also uses a form of entryism in UK politics by concealing its real identity). They attempt to obtain the passive or active support of state actors in the UK to legitimise Hamas and portray Israel as an aggressive state, thus de-legitimising it.

These two non-state actors have been highly successful in using the Greater London Authority to pursue their goals, receiving both passive and active support for Hamas front organisations and anti-Israeli public policy positions during Ken Livingstone’s term as Mayor of London. This success has been used to further infiltrate the UK (in policy terms) and the police and security services (subverting anti-terrorism strategy and policy). In addition, this level of infiltration has been used to marginalise the most mainstream Jewish organisations in the UK (for example the Jewish Board of Deputies, through its characterisation as a ‘Zionist’ organisation which must be smashed) and to bring extremist Islamist organisations (such as the Islamist, pro-Jamaati and pro-Hamas Muslim Council of Britain [MCB] and the Hamas Muslim Brotherhood front organisation [MAB]) into the mainstream.

Socialist Action[4] centred on the now defunct magazine Socialist Action and the current public website ‘Socialist Action Review’, is an organisation mainly composed of British citizens. Members if the Hamas front organisation the Muslim Association of Britain[5] are mainly of Palestinian origin or expatriates of other Islamist states. Both are modern forces in the sense that they pursue their goals using two key modern tools of political influence―positions in the UK state and access to the media―to further their objectives on issues ranging from terrorism to foreign policy. Socialist Action members played a key role in the Mayor’s office of the Greater London Authority as advisers to Ken Livingstone during his term as Mayor of London, with people such as Simon Fletcher as Chief of Staff; Redmond O’Neil as Policy Director of Transport and Public Affairs; John Ross as Policy Director, Economic Policy; Judith Woodward as Senior Adviser on Culture;  Anne Kane as Consultant and myself, a former member of the Socialist Action. Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood supporters have played significant roles in influencing the UK police and security agencies through MAB, its presence in the Muslim Council of Britain and its highly influential modern European Islamist philosopher and academic Dr Tariq Ramadan. MAB members such as Dr Azzam Tamimi have been regular guests on media programmes, including BBC’s programme Newsnight, and Anas al-Tikriti has often written in The Guardian newspaper’s ‘Comment is Free’ column. 

This process of modernising extremism has been labelled ‘fascists in suits’, in reference to neo-fascist groups in Europe, who wear suits to disguise themselves as ‘mainstream’ political actors in order to obtain legitimacy in the media and amongst the electorate.[6] In the UK there are both ‘revolutionary socialists in suits’ and ‘revolutionary Islamists in suits’. The former are the leading lights of Socialist Action and occupied key political positions in the Ken Livingstone administration. The latter are MAB members who occupy important political positions within the peace movement and the UK Islamic constituency, denoting the legitimacy they have gained in mainstream circles.

However, as was stated earlier in the article, this is a process based on ‘entryism’. Its main ingredient is subterfuge, concealing the real identity of the groups’ political affiliations. The real affiliations and political positions of these revolutionary groups open them up to scrutiny and criticism in their roles in state agencies and bodies such as the Greater London Authority and the police and security services, to the extent of threatening their viability.

Socialist Action: Objectives and Strategy

Socialist Action strategy is based on the Trokskyite concept of a world socialist revolution.[7] It seeks to overthrow capitalist states and replace them with a Leninist ‘Proletarian Dictatorship’. Its predecessor organisations operated an electoral strategy outside of the Labour Party, without success, as the International Marxist Group British Section of the Fourth International. This is what has led Socialist Action to use entryism. The group decided to use an ‘entryist’ strategy to gain access to the Labour Party in the 1980s and 90s. It is a ‘modern’ Trotskyite group in a different sense to the use of the term ‘modern’ earlier in this article – which was ‘modern’ interaction with the state and the media. This is its willingness to operate on the terrain of contemporary UK and global circumstances by accommodating the new left wing social movements, among them women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation and the greens. Later on, it will be noticeable that Socialist Action has sought to make Hamas Front organisations in the UK to some of these new left social movements.

The group bases its tactical sophistication on the Trotskyite concept of the ‘United Front’―a willingness to make temporary and very narrow political and limited objective-based alliances with wider social movements and political forces on an issue by issue campaigns basis. During the 1990s it acquired an ability to work on a long term basis with the leftist elements of the Labour Party, specifically the Campaign Groups of MPs and Ken Livingstone. It also used the ‘united front’ tactic to work with much wider sections of the Labour Party and other political and social movements on short-term objectives of issue-based campaigns such as abortion rights, anti-racism, gay rights and the peace movement.[8] This paved the way for it to obtain a passive legitimacy within the Labour Party. However, Ken Livingstone denied its abilities and effectiveness as a revolutionary organisation to journalists such as the BBC’s Andrew Hosken in his biography Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone.

Socialist Action as a Labour Party entryist group sought a symbiotic relationship with leftist Labour MPs who would work with the group on a long-term basis. This was underscored by an unwritten contract: support for the electoral and political ambitions of the MP in return for organising the political activists and quietly recruiting members to the organisation, as well as pursuing revolutionary aims at a covert level through this new level of legitimacy. Furthermore, Socialist Actions positions on Israel, to some extent, and to a lesser extent on Hamas, overlap with those of leftist MPs, although the latter have not been subjected to any intense scrutiny. Only Ken Livingstone, as Mayor of London, was closely examined. Indeed,  sustaining his relationship with Muslim Brotherhood elements and his decision not to retract his racially inflammatory and deeply insulting description of a Jewish reporter as a ‘concentration camp guard’ caused him huge political damage.

Muslim Association of Britain: Objectives and Strategy

The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), as the UK front organisation of Hamas and the wider Muslim Brotherhood, has a natural sympathy with the strategy of seeking to overthrow the ‘Zionist’ state of Israel and ‘corrupt’ Muslim regimes. This is consistent with its aim to establish Islamic states according to the Muslim Brotherhood model and Hamas Charter.

Article two of the Hamas Charter clearly states that ‘The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is an international organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete adherence to all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life’. The organisation is anti-Western in that it  conforms to the distinction drawn by its key historical ideologue Sayyid Qutb between Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic ignorance) and Islamic Sharia (religious law):  all Jahili ‘Muslims’ (according to his interpretation), Jews and Westerners must be destroyed. According to Qutb’s book Milestones, all non-Islamic states are illegitimate and should be eliminated, including his own native Egypt.[9] The organisation has links with European front organisations of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, and the more theological European Council for the Fatwa and Research.

In the UK it has adopted a strategy similar to the Trotskyite ‘United Front’ on the issues of Islamism, with two main elements. Firstly it aims to capture the UK constituency interested in global issues of Islam, specifically supporting the creation and defence of Islamic regimes and movements. Secondly, it supports the Islamicisation and radicalisation of Muslims in the West.

However, its primary focus is to support Hamas through the building of a ‘united front’ on the Palestinian question and defeating ‘Zionist forces’ in the UK. This focus has emerged again and again in different formats in its UK strategy. The key element of its legitimacy has been its participation in the anti-war and pro-peace movement, alongside a relationship with UK police and security services or their sub-elements. Since September 2002 STWC protests have been co-sponsored by MAB. Thus it has played a major role in mobilising the UK Islamic constituency within the broader peace movement, giving it some political legitimacy. These protests have included those against the Iraq War (for example  the one million people march in London), the march against the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah (Hezbollah is a close ally of Hamas in the Middle East) and now the protests against Israel in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

In the middle of this decade the Respect electoral coalition of the revolutionary socialists and the extreme left in the UK utilised a key strategy of working closely with the MAB. For example, former MAB President Anas al-Tikriti headed Respect’s Yorkshire and Humberside slate for the European elections in June 2004, without any electoral success. MAB has also sought an electoral strategy through the British Muslim initiative (BMI), led by its key player Mohammed Sawalha, a former Hamas military commando. It used the initiative for the electoral mobilisation of its Islamic constituency against pro-Israeli  and pro-Iraq war politicians during the last UK general, European and Mayor of London elections. It has not been wholly effective.

MAB’s key ally Ken Livingstone was defeated in the elections for Mayor of London in 2008.The British Muslim Initiative was given some legitimacy by hosting a meeting with Reverend Jesse Jackson during his visit to the UK. This may have been facilitated by Ken Livingstone’s traditional allies in the UK black community. Reverend Jesse Jackson was photographed with Mohammed Sawalha at this event.

The leaders of the STWC and Respect, and in particular the Socialist Workers’ Party (an overtly revolutionary socialist organisation in the UK), have gone to great lengths to portray the MAB as representative of all people of the Muslim faith, or even all ethnic minority organisations in Britain. This is very far from the truth. The MAB is a political organisation with a very specific political agenda. In the issue of MAB’s newspaper Inspire produced for the 28 September 2002 anti-war demonstration, an article on the MAB’s ‘Historical Roots and Background’ linked it explicitly to the Islamist tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood.

MAB seeks to lead its market domain by innovation, takeovers, alliances and mergers in the political field of Middle East and Muslim politics in the UK, to use strategic economic terminology.  It has taken over Muslim organisations where it can. In 2005 it took over the North London Mosque from its competitor for the radical Islamist constituency in the UK, Abu Hamza and his firebrand extremism. It even used the Metropolitan Police to help in this task,[10] using highly sophisticated political tactics and manipulating state agencies to gain control over other organisations by portraying itself as moderate. It also exploits the disruption caused by its opponents for its own benefit. This sort of tactic has been made possible by building up the credibility of its work through a visible and active relationship with UK state actors.

MAB has differentiated itself from its competitors in Hizb ut Tahrir (HuT), which is now banned in the UK. Rather than putting itself in a position of opposition and conflict with such forces, MAB has learned from the tactics used by revolutionary socialist and extreme left organisations in the UK. . MAB has also been a beneficiary of the political participation of Hamas and many Muslim Brotherhood organisations in elections. However, contrary to its own and its allies’ claims and attempts to manipulate public opinion, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in elections does not make them a democratic force. Rather, the ideology of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood  is opposed to democratic pluralism, as demonstrated by Hamas in Gaza.. The Bolsheviks participated in Constituent Assembly elections―they lost to the Mensheviks and resorted to a coup d’état to seize power. The Nazis under Adolf Hitler also participated in elections, but used these to abolish democracy and destroy freedom in Germany. There is no logical link between participation in elections and a commitment to democracy. Hamas is perhaps more similar to the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, used its election success to eliminate its opposition. It carried out a coup d’état to purge Fatah military forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian National Authority: it resorted to killing its political opponents and competitors.

MAB has also sought to mobilise the UK and European Muslim constituency for Islamist radicalisation through building short-term issued-based campaigns on issues such the French ban on the Muslim headscarf (Hijab) in a campaign called ‘Pro-Hijab’. The title of the campaign was deliberately designed to send an Islamist message to its Islamic constituencies in the UK and Europe, despite the argument that this campaign was based on the right of Muslim women to choose to wear the Hijab, in opposition to the French government’s ban.

MAB has been highly successful in taking over Muslim organisations in the UK and across Europe. It has the controlling share of a huge network of Muslim organisations and umbrella bodies such as the Federation of Organisations of Islamic Students (FOSIS), the British Muslim Initiative, the North London Mosque and the European Muslim Brotherhood fronts.

Peace Movement Players against a Peace Settlement in the Middle East?

Despite participation in the ‘peace’ movement, revolutionary socialist and revolutionary Islamist organisations have political, anti-Zionist positions that directly contradict the international community’s efforts to create a comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian people. Peace is equated solely with the defeat of Zionism and imperialism, even if this means ‘terrorism’. In this sense, these revolutionary non-state actors are anti-modern. They cannot perceive that modern forces in developing countries, including Islamic-majority states, may want an accommodation with the West as part of an economically dynamic equation in the global economy. The contrast between successful Middle Eastern economies open to the West, such as Dubai, and those closed to the West, such as the failed and highly unstable Afghanistan state under the Islamist Taliban and Somalia under the Islamic Courts Union regime, does not fit into the revolutionary paradigm of these organisational actors who romanticises Islamism.  

Israel is a recognised nation-state (it is defined as such by the United Nations by its membership of nation-states). The Palestinian National Authority is an embryonic state on the basis of developing a viable nation-state. A key part of the comprehensive peace settlement is the recognition of the state of Israel and its legitimate right to exist. By raising once again the question of Israel’s right to exist, Hamas has generated one of the biggest obstacles to the peace settlement. It is part of a new Islamist revolutionary position against the existing positions of the international community, such as the Quartet on the Middle East (compromising the United Nations, European Union, Russian Federation and United States of America) and the dominant trend in the established Middle East nation-states.

Socialist Action describes Israel as a ’terrorist’ state, and by implication a state without any legitimacy or right to exist. In fact, such a characterisation seeks to validate attempts to attack the state and to destroy it. By this logic, supporters of such a state are sympathisers with terrorism and must be opposed. This is part of the ideology of terrorism which, by a twisted logic, describes Jewish people as Zionists and part of a global Jewish conspiracy. It also gives ideological and theological encouragement to those willing to carry out terrorist attacks, including those on specific Jewish targets, such as Nariman House in the recent Mumbai attacks.[11]

To defeat Israel politically by de-legitimising it together with its supporters in the UK is a second primary objective of the revolutionary socialist and Islamist organisations. One part of this tactic is to undermine the level of crime committed during the Holocaust by the Nazis against Jewish people. Israel must be portrayed as an aggressive rather than a defensive state, created as an act of aggression rather than as an escape from persecution. One of the recent protests in London has termed current events the ‘Gaza holocaust’―a highly dubious and questionable metaphor on many levels (amongst them scale, legitimacy and aims of state and non-state actors). This borrowing of the terminology of suffering can often have the effect of undermining the scale of the genocide and barbarity in the Jewish Holocaust carried out by the Nazis.

However, this attempt to de-legitimise Israel and portray it as an aggressor is being pursued at a global level. In the Middle East, for example, Iran hosted the global Holocaust revisionism conference and inn the UK Ken Livingstone labelled a Jewish reporter a Nazi concentration guard. This was intended to soften up public and political opinion, which views the Jewish people as victims of the Holocaust.

Ken Livingstone the politician has a long history of constantly characterising Israeli politicians such as Ariel Sharon as ‘war criminals’[12] and the actions of the Israeli state in military operations as ‘crimes against humanity’. Yet it is still important to understand the specific impact of entryist revolutionary actors in sustaining and encouraging pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli positions.[13] They encourage Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to be active and legitimate actors in UK politics, rather than a group which should come under public, political and media scrutiny and whose legitimacy should be challenged on grounds of its pro-terrorism positions.

Conclusion

The national demonstration on the current events in Gaza, held in London on 3 January 2009, was a product of the work of MAB and Socialist Action, two entryist organisations, through their roles in STWC, the BMI, as advisers to Ken Livingstone and in other organisations. The role of revolutionary entryist actors in the UK in supporting Hamas and opposing Israel has been significant. The UK government has taken significant steps to contain the advocacy of terrorism. The media is also helping in exposing terrorist sympathisers in the UK. Both need to be aware of the use, by these two revolutionary movements, of entryist tactics in order to influence public policy on the Middle East. They must be vigilant in challenging the legitimacy of these organisations, as their policies are directly opposed to a diplomatic peace settlement on the Israeli-Palestinian question. It is necessary for all political, media and government bodies in the UK to articulate a strategic two-state solution in order to achieve a full and urgent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian question and avoid being manipulated by entryist revolutionary socialist and revolutionary Islamicist actors, their front organisations and political personalities.

About Atma Singh

Atma Singh is Public Policy and Asian Affairs expert and a former top level Policy Adviser on Asian Affairs to the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone in the Mayor’s Office 2001-2007. He left the Mayor’s Office on the issue of the Mayor’s developing relationship with Muslim Brotherhood, which he opposed. He is the author of ‘An Asian Century Manifesto: Global Political Economy of the 21^st Century’ (London: ASK Publishers, 2008).He is a former Lecturer and Senior Human Resource Development Consultant. He is a member of the Keynote Professional Speakers Network and Public Policy International. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics from Newcastle Upon Tyne University (UK) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Notes